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Tag Archives: pop culture

I’ve been looking for a way to ease myself back into blogging after the summer hiatus and then Sapphire Street gave me the idea of posting a weekly list of 5 things that have interested me, so here we go:

Andy bought us the first season of Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone on DVD and I finally understand why this magnificent series has become such a cultural touchstone. Each episode is like a mini-movie, beautifully produced, acted and directed. We’re on episode 9 and so far themes of isolation, alienation and war have dominated, which is not too surprising for a show that emerged from the 1950s. I absolutely loved ‘The Lonely’, in which a man convicted to serve out his sentence alone on an asteroid gains possession of a robot woman companion only to find himself faced with a terrible choice. ‘The Sixteen Millemetre Shrine’ introduced to me the work of the rather awesome Ida Lupino who both directed and starred in the episode. The best episode I’ve seen so far is one of the most famous: ‘Time Enough at Last’. In this haunting story, a harassed man finally finds himself alone with plenty of time to read his beloved books, but of course nothing ever goes according to plan in “The Twilight Zone”. The ending is unforgettable. We’ve also been watching 1980s reboot, The New Twilight Zone, on The Horror Channel and it isn’t bad, though no patch on the original.

This is an interesting post from NPR’s blog, At the Movies: The Women are Gone. It makes the important point that the lack of women in the movies has nothing to do with the popularity or income-generating potential of women-centred movies:

They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by “we,” I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says “win some, lose some” and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every “surprise success” about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.

From the Guardian, an interview with writer Toni Morrison. I really like her points about the importance of owning your feelings and the way the significance of female friendship has been neglected in literature.

I was hoping to make a start on my enormous backlog of posts and get some actual writing done this week, but an evil head cold has left me with just enough energy for a link round-up and nothing else. The rest will have to wait until the New Year.